Currently as a Seventeen year old, I am near the end of my first year in college. As it's apparent I'm at a crucial stage in my life, trying to figure what to do next and what sort of career I should work towards.
I'm not sure what career exactly I want to pursue, I do however know I want it to be purely writing based (hopefully creative). I feel like writing is my calling, it is something I get pure joy from and well it is my escape from the real world.
Some may think I'm too young to understand the art of writing, and maybe I am. However, I love the power words have, and how if your sentences are structured in a way you can make someone feel something, and that is what I believe what writing is. Making your reader feel something, taking them different places, either making them witness something or if you're simply teaching them a lesson or two.
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| It's funny as the clock ticks by so does our life... second by second. |
I believe I can began writing in year six, they were only short stories and I hadn't taken any of seriously. Also it they were sort of involuntary, my English teacher she always set my homework as writing short stories, she'd give me titles and I went home sat at wooden dining room table, wracked my imagination and wrote several short stories at a time. She'd set titles in advance, however I was always too excited and wrote for hours until I was unable to write no more.
To this day I remember a few of them, sadly it seems as the years have passed I have misplaced the actual textbook which held all of them in. The two short stories I remember the most were T
he Magic Pen and
Shipwrecked.
A brief description of both short stories;
The Magic Pen - A girl goes into a stationary shop looking for a new pen to write in her diary with. There are plenty to choose from, however one catches her eye as it glows at her, and her only. Drawn to the pen she bought it and took it home. Only at home she sees her boyfriend making out with her best friend in her street, this angers her which causes the pen to glow, in anger she holds the pen and her imagination goes wild, therefore suddenly a monster appears in the street and attacks her best friend. Feeling guilty and terrible, she reverses the act with the magic pen and decides she will only use it for writing and doing good things with. - In recent years I have become tempted to work on this and develop it, it shall be done soon, it is in the pile.
Shipwrecked - A cruise on a glittery pink boat (don't ask), the engine conks out basically and the ship crashes, passengers black out some just disappear on the island. There is a group of people, they find each other and basically they have to survive on the island, learning new skills, to build shelters, hunt for food etc. They try to get help, but eventually doing SOS with rocks and making plenty of fire signals, they are rescued by aircraft. - I remembering writing and reading this out in front of my class, I enjoyed it and they appeared to as well. In recent times I have wrote a poem based on this short story of mine, maybe it will be shared in the future.
Although that was when I started writing creatively, I hadn't thought of anything of it, nor did I think it could be possible to make a career out of it.
Then came along high school - very confusing time- nonetheless this is where my love for writing developed. In my first year of high school, it soon became evident that the only lesson I really enjoyed was English, the others I just dragged my heels through for five years. I got English, it worked for me and it was personally the best lesson I ever had. In my first year, my teacher got us to read
Face and
Skellig, both brilliant books. I remember really enjoying
Face, the teen fiction and how it made me feel, my love for that book has carried on to this day. I believe
Face was the first good book I ever read and loved, it sparked an interest in me, later I found myself beginning to write teen fiction, inspired by what I had once read.
In that year seven class, we got a task to write a story, a horror, well as horror as a year seven child can produce. I remember sitting in my seat bursting with excitement, only I didn't just want to do horror I decided to make my characters teenagers, at the time of course I wasn't actually aware of teen fiction or the genre, but nonetheless I was drawn to it. I was very enthusiastic about the story it was called
The Black Cat I remember refusing to put my pen down at the end of the lesson, I didn't want to leave my book behind, all I wanted to do was write - which I did and soon enough I wrote the short story perhaps many pages longer than my teacher had intended.
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| The Black Cat - Good luck or bad luck? |
The story wasn't my finest, but I can say that now seven years later, however younger me adored it. My main character, she goes about her day again she had a boyfriend, and well every now and then there is a sudden appearance of this black cat, it always appeared before something bad was about to happen, basically later her boyfriend was caught kissing another girl, and well the girl was bullied to the point she ran away from school, with the black cat almost leading her away. She found herself crying in this graveyard, and she read a rock with a date of death but no name on it. She was lead into this haunted house, where she became trapped. When in the house, it was normal until she was washing her face with water, turned into blood. She turned around to find one of her friends hanging dead behind her, so as it was she found her friends one by one dead. Until she tries to escape she meets the black cat, only to be stood near this demonic girl, purple face mucky face, pure evil. The main character basically escapes, and runs to police, only when the police check the place out nothing is there, no bodies just an empty old house. The girl is taken to a mental institution as everyone believes she has gone crazy, and one day the girl sees the black cat again, which by this time she realised it signified a warning. The evil girl appears, and basically burns the hospital down.
A work of fiction, I still have this story actually. Also I noticed the reoccurring theme of cheating or abandonment no idea why thought, although I have always enjoyed writing sad things. I thought as it being probably my first story, well it was longer than the ones I had wrote in year six, I kept it to look back on, and compare how much I have developed as a writer. That was pretty much the start of the blossoming writer inside of me. I wrote a little afterwards, but since that story and having read Face Ifound something that interested me, thanks to my year seven English teacher I found my muse.
A year or two later, I made new friends. People who were like minded who were creative. To this day I am still friends with these people, their creative and supportive influence has helped me a lot through the years. I think it was year eight or nine when I began to read more, if you ever tried to find me I would either be in the school's library picking my next book or sitting along the corridor somewhere with my head in a book, I'm not even kidding I used to come into school early just to spend my time reading, even in between classes and sometimes in class - maybe that's why I never really understood geography!
In those times of reading I was inspired, I had read
The Morganville series by Rachel Caine, they were the most enticing books I had ever read. I adored the way she used words to catch her readers, the way her descriptions made me feel that I was right there, I really enjoyed reading those books, they were romantic, teen fiction and included vampires, it is safe to say I was in love. Anyway this lead me to write my first full story, with chapters and everything. It was of course Vampire, Romance and teen fiction, by all means it may have shared the same genres as
The Morganville series it was very different from it. It was called
Modern Vampire, to this day I'm still proud of it, as it was then I decided I wanted to be an author. I liked what I wrote, I even had an audience, my peers and teachers read what I wrote. My best friend introduced me to
wattpad.com - for those who haven't heard of it it's an online reading and writing community, it is incredible and it isn't just for teens. - Also some wattpadders have been scouted by publishers, unfortunately I'm not one of them.
I started posting my work on there in 2012, and to this day I still post my work on wattpad. The story
Modern Vampire, I completed and it had an audience, however I later removed it from the website - due to doubts I was having about it being any good. In the past year or I've been working and developing the story, tweaking bits adding to it, and so I have been posting a new version chapter by chapter, and I must say that there is a huge difference.
Wattpad is like youtube but for books!
Personally I'm not wattpad famous, but I've been on it a while to know what I'm doing. My highest success on wattpad would be my 2012 story -
Falling For The Geek - I can honestly say now that it isn't my best work however it is my post popular, currently sitting in with
137,003 reads ~ I'm not bragging quite frankly I feel awkward talking about numbers and what I've achieved. I am happy with that of course what I have achieved, I love writing and it's nice to know many people have read my work.
I've found that I'm not one trick pony, I like to explore other genres, on the site I have poetry, fan fiction, romance, vampire, teen fiction, random. I go under the name
'WritingMyHeart' I use this for everything, mainly because it's true. The work reflects the writer.
Since
Modern Vampire I have wrote several stories, and over the years those around me and myself have noticed developments.
In the last few years of high school, English got better and better. We got into more books and well the creative writing tasks were my all time favourite, I remember when handing my work to my English teacher, pages and pages and her words every time would "Here we go, Lauren has wrote me a novel again" I was always writing too much, mainly because I got carried away and couldn't stop myself, once by creative juices are flowing nothing can stop me.
Now that I have just finished my first year in college/ sixth form I'm faced with questions, and doubts. I know I want a writing based career, writing is what I enjoy the most. It is the only thing I can see myself doing in the future. I've been studying English Literature, Media Studies and Photography - mainly because I was thinking about journalism, however I've sort of changed my mind but I have kept the door open in case I change my mind. I love Literature, reading and analysing books; reading in between the lines it is incredible.
The leap from GCSE to A Level has been tremendous and even difficult at times, however I'm ploughing through at the end of the day I am still writing.
My first post, I thought I ought to tell you all about me well my love for writing and where it came from. Thank you for reading this, what sparked your muse?
